The Magician’s Nephew by CS Lewis is the prequel of the very popular Chronicles of Narnia, which are ranked 261st on The Greatest Books of All Time, and are also included on The 1,000 Novels Everyone Must Read list – you find thousands of reviews of magnum opera from those two and other compilations on my blog https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/09/do-you-have-any-feedback.html and YouTube channel

 

The Magician’s Nephew by CS Lewis is the prequel of the very popular Chronicles of Narnia, which are ranked 261st on The Greatest Books of All Time, and are also included on The 1,000 Novels Everyone Must Read list – you find thousands of reviews of magnum opera from those two and other compilations on my blog https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/09/do-you-have-any-feedback.html and YouTube channel

 

8 out of 10

 

CS Lewis https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/01/surprised-by-joy-shape-of-my-early-life.html is one of my favorite authors, thinkers, even more than that, if I ‘convert’, and find absolution, redemption, then I owe him – and Andrei Plesu, perhaps a few others, after God – perpetual gratitude, for I have been, still are skeptical

 

I have read a series of his magnum opera on the subject of religion: The Abolition of Man, The Problem of Pain, The Screwtape Letters – for the latter, I should be ashamed to confess that, when I read them for the first time, maybe ten years ago or more, I misinterpreted the jocularity, and thought that the book was…mocking religion

These were days when I thought intelligent people cannot take dogmas seriously, with the help of CS Lewis https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/05/the-screwtape-letters-by-c-s-lewis.html I may be on my way to ‘conversion’, dare I (mis)quote some holy text, and mention the ‘road to Damascus’, I should google to see what happened there

 

As it happens, The Magician’s Nephew is also about Christianity, even if Lewis ‘suggested that he did not directly intend to write his Narnia stories as Christian tales, but that these aspects appeared subconsciously as he wrote, although the books did become Christian as they progressed. He thought that the tales were not direct representations or allegory, but that they might evoke or remind readers of Biblical stories’

 

I am not sure what my verdict is on The Magician’s Nephew, not that it matters in the least, it is just that notwithstanding the significance, symbols such as Aslan is a ‘Christ-like figure’, and then we have the original creation in Narnia, I preferred  https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/07/the-problem-of-pain-by-cs-lewis.html

The Problem of Pain and even The Screwtape Letters, read as they should have been, with mockery targeting the devil and his apprentice, and not making fun at the whole idea, as I first thought…in fact, I was not doing much thinking, just enjoying the text, and the fact that it was read by one of the best, John Cleese

 

The Problem of Pain cleared a very special problem, although it is prominent again, now that I have been reading Enemies, A Love Story by Isaac Singer, they wonder in there how God could stay silent during the Holocaust…now, The Problem of Pain explains that God could not make a mechanical world, in which everything is preordained and boring

Ergo, we have Free Will, which means some humans, or monsters, are so abhorrent as to kill millions in the Holocaust, Stalin murdered even more in the gulags, and now we have Putin, starting that inhuman war in Ukraine https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/09/wells-hitler-and-world-state-by-george.html let us hope it will end soon

 

Comentarii

Trimiteți un comentariu

Postări populare de pe acest blog

In The Fade aka Auf Dem Nichts, written by Hark Bohm and Fatih Akin

  In The Fade aka Auf Dem Nichts, written by Hark Bohm and Fatih Akin In The Fade has won the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film, although in this cinephile's opinion, Una Mujer Fantastica- which has won the Oscar in the same category- Nelyubov or The Square would have been better choices. Having said that, Auf Dem Nichts is a very good, significant, remarkable feature, that attracts attention to violence against minorities, in this case the Kurdish community in Germany. It is therefore not one sided, we do not have only Muslim lunatics killing innocent "infidels", but also some extreme Europeans murdering the other side. The problem is that, unacceptable, horrifying and vile as these acts are, it appears that the overwhelming majority of atrocities are committed by zealots acting in the name of Islam- radical and unrepresentative as they are for this supposedly peaceful faith, although there are passages in its holy book that seem to insist on a violent jihad and ultimat...
Citiți mai multe

Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice written by Larry Tucker and Paul Mazursky, directed by the latter is included on The New York Times’ Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made list, and Variety has published recently its Top 100 Comedies – or else, I have learned about this lately – where this feature has a top spot, as far as I remember it is higher that the 50th spot – speaking of these pages, you have access to my own more than five thousand notes on films from these and other compilations, together with another five thousand reviews on magnum opera from The Greatest Books of All Time and other sites on my blog and You Tube channel https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/09/do-you-have-any-feedback.html you may even subscribe, if you wish

Imagine
  Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice written by Larry Tucker and Paul Mazursky, directed by the latter is included on The New York Times’ Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made list, and Variety has published recently its Top 100 Comedies – or else, I have learned about this lately – where this feature has a top spot, as far as I remember it is higher that the 50 th spot – speaking of these pages, you have access to my own more than five thousand notes on films from these and other compilations, together with another five thousand reviews on magnum opera from The Greatest Books of All Time and other sites on my blog and You Tube channel https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/09/do-you-have-any-feedback.html you may even subscribe, if you wish     9 out of 10   First a correction: I wrote above that this comedy is within the first fifty of Variety’s Top 100, I just saw that it is in fact ranked 90 th , I could have edited the above, but maybe this way I will re...
Citiți mai multe